Background
Edsger Dijkstra was born on May 11, 1930 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He was the son of Douwe Wijbe, a chemist, inventor, and president of the Dutch Chemical Society, and Brechtje (Kluyver) Dijkstra Cornelia, a mathematician.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000CHB13/?tag=2022091-20
1962
(Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Resea...)
Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Research Fellow, my life has been very different from what it had been before. The daily routine changed: instead of going to the University each day, where I used to spend most of my time in the company of others, I now went there only one day a week and was most of the time -that is, when not travelling!- alone in my study. In my solitude, mail and the written word in general became more and more important. The circumstance that my employer and I had the Atlantic Ocean between us was a further incentive to keep a fairly complete record of what I was doing. The public part of that output found its place in what became known as "the EWD series", which can be viewed as a form of scientific correspondence, possible since the advent of the copier. (That same copier makes it hard to estimate its actual distribution: I myself made about two dozen copies of my texts, but their recipients were welcome to act as further nodes of the distribution tree. ) The decision to publish a se1ection from the EWD series in book form was at first highly embarrassing, but as the months went by I got used to the idea. As soon as some guiding principles had been adopted -preferably not published elsewhere, as varied and as representative as possible, etc.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387906525/?tag=2022091-20
1982
educator engineer programmer scientist writer
Edsger Dijkstra was born on May 11, 1930 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He was the son of Douwe Wijbe, a chemist, inventor, and president of the Dutch Chemical Society, and Brechtje (Kluyver) Dijkstra Cornelia, a mathematician.
Dijkstra originally intended to study law, but his scientific talents came to light following his final exams at the gymnasium in 1948. His exam grades were better than most of his teachers had ever seen, and he was convinced, as he recalled in a written interview with contributor Frank Hertle, “that it would be a pity if I did not devote myself to science.” Dijkstra enrolled at Leyden University to study mathematics and physics.
It was during his early years at Leyden that Dijkstra was introduced to computers. As a reward for his academic performance, in 1951 his father offered him the opportunity to attend a three-week computer programming course (for the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, or EDSAC) in Cambridge, England. Dijkstra, who then had plans to become a theoretical physicist, thought it would be a good idea to learn more about computers.
In 1959 Edsger received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Amsterdam.
Dijkstra began his career at the Mathematical Center, where he worked with J. A. Zonneveld designing an ALGOL 60 compiler. The project frequently took him outside of The Netherlands and gave him the opportunity to begin polishing his English. The ALGOL implementation took eight months to complete and was done in August of 1960, more than a year before their nearest competitor. This work helped establish Dijkstra’s reputation among computer scientists in America.
When A. van Wijngaarden, the director of the computation department at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, heard by chance of Dijkstra’s plans to attend this course, he interviewed him and offered him a job. Dijkstra began working part-time at the Mathematical Center in 1952 and took a full-time position there in 1956.
While at the Mathematical Center, Dijkstra worked with Bram J. Loopstra and Carel S. Scholten on the design and construction of a computer, known as the ARM AC. He was primarily responsible for the software, and they for the hardware, and his involvement included writing the programming manual that was to contain a complete functional description of the machine. The document served as a “contract” between Dijkstra and the two other men: they knew what they had to build and Dijkstra knew what he would build uPon. This project had an important influence on the course of his career.
Dijkstra already sensed that computers would be a permanent and important part of the modern world and had become convinced of the need to program them accurately. From this point forward, he felt personally challenged to develop a methodology for constructing programs that could be proven correct before being run on a computer.
During this period, Dijkstra designed some of his first computer algorithms—sequences of instructions deigned to perform specific mathematical tasks.
In 1962, Dijkstra became professor of mathematics at the Technical University in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. His work there included a collaboration that produced a multiprogramming operating system (called “THE Multiprogramming System”) for the university’s computer, an Electrologica X8. THE Multiprogramming System was to influence the design of nearly all later operating systems.
In a famous 1968 letter to the editor of Communications of the ACM, Dijkstra argued that the ability of programmers to read and understand programs written in high-level languages was severely compromised by the number of GOTO statements in these programs.
The alternative Dijkstra offered he called structured programming.
In 1972 Dijkstra contributed to the book Notes on Structured Programming, in which he wrote that “program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!” He advanced the idea that “it is not only the programmer’s task to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner.” In order to provide the proof, the program must be “usefully structured.” In Dijkstra’s view, every effort must always be made to design programs to be as error-free as possible from the beginning; he believed that this method of design made programs easier to construct and understand. The easier it was to write and comprehend a program, he argued, the easier it was to avoid introducing errors or bugs into it.
Dijkstra left Eindhoven in August of 1973 to accept a position as a research fellow with the Burroughs Corporation. Even though the company was headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, Dijkstra’s position allowed him to continue to work and live in his home in Nuenen, a village near Eindhoven in The Netherlands. Burroughs gave Dijkstra great latitude in the use of his time, and he traveled widely during his years with the company, lecturing all over the world and frequently visiting the United States.
In the early 1980s, the intellectual climate at Burroughs changed; the company became more concerned with short-term profits and Dijkstra’s colleagues became disenchanted and began to leave. Additionally, Dijkstra’s interests were shifting from computers and programming to mathematical methodology in general. He felt it appropriate to return to a university environment, and the University of Texas offered him the Schlumberger Centennial chair in Computer Science in 1984.
One of the most influential members of computing science's founding generation, Dijkstra helped shape the new discipline from both an engineering and a theoretical perspective. His fundamental contributions cover diverse areas of computing science, including compiler construction, operating systems, distributed systems, sequential and concurrent programming, programming paradigm and methodology, programming language research, program design, program development, program verification, software engineering principles, graph algorithms, and philosophical foundations of computer programming and computer science. Many of his papers are the source of new research areas.
The vocabulary of computer programmers is far richer for the influence of Dijkstra.
Dijkstra challenged one of the most basic techniques of programming at that time: the abrupt transfer of control from one point in a flow of computer instructions to some other point in the program. This technique was called a GOTO statement, and programmers were using them to interrupt sequences of computer instructions in order to perform a different instruction or set of instructions. Dijkstra developed one of his most famous algorithms—the Shortest Path.
(Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Resea...)
1982(Clean wraps, corners square, lay flat. No creases to the ...)
Quotations:
“My point is that a program is never a goal in itself; the purpose of a program is to evoke computations and the purpose of the computations is to establish a desired effect.”
"The program is the final product made by the programmer, the possible computations evoked by it ... are the true subject matter of his trade.”
Dijkstra was a member of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1957, Dijkstra married Maria Cornelia Debets, they would eventually have three children together.
